Welcome to Blandings Castle, a place that is never itself without an imposter.Wodehouse himself once noted that "Blandings has impostors like other houses have mice." On this particular occasion there are two, both intent on a dangerous enterprise. Lord Emsworth's secretary, the Efficient Baxter, is on the alert and determined to discover what is afoot—despite the distractions caused by the Honorable Freddie Threepwood's hapless affair of the heart.Freddie is engaged to mar...

A body on the London Underground; the strange disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax; a parcel containing some coarse salt and two freshly severed human ears. This collection of eight world-famous cases from Doctor Watson’s portfolio illustrates the singular mental faculties of Sherlock Holmes. In the course of his investigations, Holmes himself is struck down by a virulent Eastern disease, and we are reintroduced to his remarkable brother Mycroft: “all other men are specialists, but his spe...

Often called the greatest novel ever written, War and Peace is at once a historical war epic, a philosophical study, and a celebration of the Russian spirit.Noted for its mastery of realistic detail and psychological analysis, War and Peace follows the metamorphosis of five aristocratic families against the backdrop of the Napoleonic wars. Individual stories interweave as each of Tolstoy’s memorable characters seek fulfillment, fall in love, make ...

“Dr. Mortimer looked strangely at us for an instant and his voice sank almost to a whisper as he answered, “Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound.”The “luminous, ghostly, and spectral” hound of family legend has been seen roaming the moors at night. Sir Charles Baskerville has recently died, and it appears that the new baronet, Sir Henry, has inherited not only the vast wealth and property of his family but also a terrible destiny. To this Holmes ominously observ...

Admired by J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis and considered by W. H. Auden to be “the only English children’s book in the same class as the Alice books,” The Princess and the Goblin is a classic example of nineteenth-century children’s literary fairy tales. This is an ageless tale of courage and loyalty, beauty and mystery, and above all, good and evil.The discovery of a secret stairway running to the top of the castle where she lives leads Princess Irene to a revelation even more w...

When noted English writer W. Somerset Maugham set off for the South Seas to regain his health, his experiences would become the bedrock for the stories represented here. These are among Maugham’s best work, as well as some of the best stories ever written about the exotic South Seas.“Mackintosh” is a taut psychological study of two officials on a remote tropic island. “The Fall of Edward Barnard” is a story about what is important in life, a precursor to Maugham’s well-known novel,...

This is the story of an artist who was willing to sacrifice everything for the sake of art. Charles Strickland, a stock broker in London, seems like a good, honest man. But one day, at the age of forty, heleaves his business, his wife, and his children and goes to Paris. He has neither money nor prospects, and he knows practically nothing about art, but he is seized with a passion to paint, and for the rest of his life, nothing else matters to him. He gives up everything to which he had be...

E. M. Forster’s celebrated social comedy explores romantic intrigue and prim propriety among a colorful cast of Edwardian characters. Lucy Honeychurch, a young English woman traveling in Italy with her stuffy chaperone aunt, finds herself constrained by the claustrophobic influence of her British guardians and attracted to the free-spirited George Emerson, whose family’s radical politics make him entirely unsuitable. Sharing a spontaneous moment of passion with him in the Italian countrysi...

Hector Monro, writing under the pseudonym of Saki, is justly renowned for his urbane and witty short stories. His eccentric characters, humorous dialogue, and engaging domestic situations all reveal a penetrating and sometimes disturbing insight into human nature. As a quixotic tour guide, Saki leads the reader from garden party to pig sty to political convention with the ease of one who is intimately familiar with the cares and foibles of the human condition, showing us this vista of life...

This is a good example of early Wodehouse. It is here that Jeeves makes his first appearance with these unremarkable words: “Mrs. Gregson to see you, sir.” Years later, when Jeeves became a household name, Wodehouse said he blushed to think of the offhand way he had treated the man at their first encounter.In the story “Extricating Young Gussie,” we find Bertie Wooster’s redoubtable Aunt Agatha “who had an eye like a man-eating fish and had got amoral suasion down to a fine point.”...

John Galsworthy’s epic Forsyte Saga follows the fortunes of the venerable Forsyte family, a moneyed clan whose passions are ever at war with its values. Galsworthy won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1932 “for his distinguished art of narration, which takes its highest form in the Forsyte Saga.”The Man of Property, the first novel in the trilogy, introduces us to Soames Forsyte, a solicitor and prominent figure in his family. Accustomed to getting whatever he wants, he se...

Pretty, impecunious Sally Nicholas never dreamed a fortune could prove a disadvantage, until she becomes an heiress and watches in bewilderment as her orderly existence goes haywire. Coping first with her brother’s wild theatrical ambitions, then with the defection of her fiancé and his immediate replacement by a much more appropriate but strangely unattractive suitor, Sally finds that life in New York is becoming altogether too complicated and a trip to England only makes the whole situat...